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- Aug 9, 2012
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Although exceptions exist, the overwhelming majority preference of agents appears to be for proposals and sample chapters to be pasted into the body of the email, not attached as PDF or other format-preserving file attachment.
OF those, a decent number indicate in their submissions guidelines that they expect a specific font (usually Times New Roman, 12 point) and even a specific line spacing (always double spaced). I don't know if they usually intend that as a guideline for people who have advanced to the stage of sending in a full MS or if they mean for the initial query itself.
It remains true even as of 2014 that email, as an official protocol, does not natively "support" formatting; in other words, as far as the official designation of internet protocols and etc are concerned, email is still a plain text format. True, dozens of email programs and web mail interfaces make it possible (nevertheless) to send some approximation of formatted email. But I'm under the impression that it's still very much a crapshoot as to whether the formatting specified by the sender is interpreted with accuracy by the email environment being used by the recipient.
I confess that I'm an email dinosaur of sorts: I still use an email PROGRAM (an obsolete one at that, Eudora), and detest this horrid webmail thing that everyone else seems to use, but I just checked my ISP's own webmail front end and also the very-popular GMail webmail front end and neither seems to provide any mechanism for double-spacing (or single spacing or triple spacing or 1.5 spacing etc etc etc).
• Do you, as an agent, expect to open an email and see proposals or sample chapters rendered in Times New Roman 12 point double spaced, right there in the body of the email? Would you discard an emailed proposal / query with sample chapters if the proposal or sample chapters pasted into the email body were not double spaced?
• Do you expect / require ONLY that the proposal and/or sample chapters be formatted? Would it in any way annoy you for the main query to come in in plain text (displaying as whatever your own email program uses as ITS default text for email bodies)? Would you in fact PREFER that the pitch and any other portion of a query letter other than the formal proposal or sample chapters land as plain text so that your own email program's preferences will be obeyed?
• Do you, as an author submitting, believe that you have successfully formatted outbound email sections such as proposals and sample chapters in Times New Roman 12 point double spaced? Or just Times New Roman 12 point, with no belief that you can make email behave as "double spaced?" Or some other combination of possible and not-so-possible email formatting?
OF those, a decent number indicate in their submissions guidelines that they expect a specific font (usually Times New Roman, 12 point) and even a specific line spacing (always double spaced). I don't know if they usually intend that as a guideline for people who have advanced to the stage of sending in a full MS or if they mean for the initial query itself.
It remains true even as of 2014 that email, as an official protocol, does not natively "support" formatting; in other words, as far as the official designation of internet protocols and etc are concerned, email is still a plain text format. True, dozens of email programs and web mail interfaces make it possible (nevertheless) to send some approximation of formatted email. But I'm under the impression that it's still very much a crapshoot as to whether the formatting specified by the sender is interpreted with accuracy by the email environment being used by the recipient.
I confess that I'm an email dinosaur of sorts: I still use an email PROGRAM (an obsolete one at that, Eudora), and detest this horrid webmail thing that everyone else seems to use, but I just checked my ISP's own webmail front end and also the very-popular GMail webmail front end and neither seems to provide any mechanism for double-spacing (or single spacing or triple spacing or 1.5 spacing etc etc etc).
• Do you, as an agent, expect to open an email and see proposals or sample chapters rendered in Times New Roman 12 point double spaced, right there in the body of the email? Would you discard an emailed proposal / query with sample chapters if the proposal or sample chapters pasted into the email body were not double spaced?
• Do you expect / require ONLY that the proposal and/or sample chapters be formatted? Would it in any way annoy you for the main query to come in in plain text (displaying as whatever your own email program uses as ITS default text for email bodies)? Would you in fact PREFER that the pitch and any other portion of a query letter other than the formal proposal or sample chapters land as plain text so that your own email program's preferences will be obeyed?
• Do you, as an author submitting, believe that you have successfully formatted outbound email sections such as proposals and sample chapters in Times New Roman 12 point double spaced? Or just Times New Roman 12 point, with no belief that you can make email behave as "double spaced?" Or some other combination of possible and not-so-possible email formatting?
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